Essen by chance a friend of mine who was over working on some packet data and he mentioned something about a FFXI server written using LUA. Now I am not familiar with this language at all, but according to the source files it seems like an easier road than Erlang I would think. here is the link https://forums.dspt.info I downloaded their source easy to compile and then it uses the basic db it installs etc for user management. Thought you might wanna take a look.

There is no language that exists today that would make writing a server easier than Erlang. Do note however that I was planning on using Lua as the base syntax for writing mission scripts (adapted to PSU of course, so not with the exact same semantics). But a server in Lua? Waste of time.